Mark Anthony Neal

Introduction: Wild Seed in the Machine

Black Code Studies is queer, femme, fugitive, and radical. As praxis and methodology, it waxes insurgent. It refutes conceptions of the digital that remove black diasporic people from engagement with technology, modernity, or the future. It centers black thought and cultural production across a range of digital platforms, but especially social media, where black freedom struggles intersect with black play and death in polymorphic and polyphonic intimacy. Black Code Studies roots itself in the challenge of living in the wake of black people rendered inhuman, non-existent, and disposable by the slave ship, the plantation, the colonial state, the prison, the border. Facing devastation again and again, black folks need in and for each other becomes both time-traveling desire and reservoir knowledge. As Gumbs shows, our oracle work seeps up and through tools, structures, analog and digital architecture we were never meant to survive much less occupy. When Cramer and Raengo declare that “black code studies emerges as a way to prepare black studies for an increasingly complex set of cultural rhythms and temporalities,” they capture the context in which this special issue appears in your hands. “Black Code” was conceived at a particular moment in the history of race—or, perhaps more apropos, Blackness—and the digital. In 2002, Alondra Nelson gathered geeks, freaks, and global nerds of color around “Afrofuturism.” Their work—and Nelson’s listserv organizing praxis—pre-dated social media platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. Broadband was not a “public” good yet. Fifteen years later, protecting and imagining Black Futures is a rallying cry in the face of immediate and structural racial violence. When new platforms or syntax (i.e., hashtags) appear, as Conley shows, black feminists reappropriate them for their own use despite having been created by tech companies for capitalistic pursuits. Protecting our black digital presence is about protecting a future in which our physicality may not matter in the same way that it has in the past. As praxis, Black Code Studies moves beyond the dyad Black + Digital, transgressive as that pairing has proven to be. It is the viral blackness that, described by Wade, “subverts social hierarchies by putting the needs and desires of Black bodies at the center.” It is the #Blktwitterstorians hashtag, created by Brown and Crutchfield to highlight black historians and history. It is blackness as a deep humanism and affect(ion) that confronts, as Driscoll shows, the biopolitics of the hexadecimal, and, as Greene-Hayes and James discuss, the biopolitics of organizing and everyday antiblackness. Black Code Studies rejects formulations of Black Studies that tie intellectual production only to institutional structures or

Up From hustling: Power, plantations, and the hip‐hop Mogul

These groups [the black poor of the Mississippi Delta] learned a painful lesson that many scholars have yet to learn; slavery and the plantation are not an anathema to capitalism but are pillars of it...Slavery, sharecropping, mechanization, and prison, wage, and migratory labor are just a few permutations possible within a plantation complex. None of these forms changes the basic features of resource monopoly and extreme ethnic and class polarization. —Clyde Woods

N*ggas in Paris: hip-hop in exile

ABSTRACT This essay explores the meaning potentials of the exportation of American commercial rap music (exemplified via rap stars Kanye West and Jay Z) through the metaphorical lens of the discourse of exile. This perspective opens a view to Black aspirations as a vagabond, deviant, unsettled, search for the good life. Using, for example, the uptake of West and Jay Zs song, ‘Niggas in Paris,’ in a socialist party candidates platform ad to attract aspiring immigrant communities in France, both privileged and disadvantaged diasporic Africans, or Afropolitans, as argued herein, are of the world; but do not, necessarily, experience first-class citizenship, despite the state of their mobility. Additional examinations of digital, sonic, lyrical and material art are undertaken by the author to reveal the search for deeper meaning and freedom among Afrodiasporic populations within the United States and globally.

Now I Ain’t Saying He’s a Crate Digger: Kanye West, “Community Theaters” and the Soul Archive

Kanye West’s first collaboration with Jay Z on The Dynasty: Roc La Familia (2000) gave an early inkling on what would be the producer’s contribution to the sonic excavation of the Soul music tradition of the late 1960s and 1970s. The track “This Can’t be Life” features Beanie Sigel and Scarface (whose The Fixx, West would later contribute production), and is based on a sample from Harold Melvin and the Bluenote’s “I Miss You.” Though the song is not significant within the larger scope of West’s career, it placed Jay Z in a distinctly soulful context that would form the basis of the rapper’s career-defining The Blueprint (2001) as well as frame the early stages of West’s own solo career. At the foundation of West’s music prior to the release of his 2007 recording Graduation is recovery of the aesthetic possibilities of Soul music—a broadly conceived attempt to elevate Soul music as a classical American form, rooted in what Guthrie Ramsey Jr. calls the “community theaters” of Black life.1 Additionally, West’s attention to the Soul archive was also a method to balance his status as one of the most recognizable mainstream rap producers—a legitimate Pop star—with his creative devotion to laboring as a “Crate Digger,” as evidenced by famous lyrics that reference long periods of seclusion and a Cosby show reference to living in a different world.

“I Am Not Just From Here:” The Roots of Hip Hop's Cosmopolitanism: A Reflection on Isoke's “Women, Hip Hop and Cultural Resistance in Dubai”

This response paper considers the gender realities of the subjects in Isokes Women, Hip Hop, and Cultural Resistance in Dubai in relation to U.S. based hip hop artists who have recently begun to situate their work and image in larger international contexts. Neal argues that the while recent and publicized acts have begun to mark US hip hop artists as “citizens of the world,” in fact hip hop artist have always been cosmopolitian.

Sly Stone and the Sanctified Church

It has become much of a truism that the generation of black Soul artists from the late 1950s and early 1960s—figures like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke—formed the critical components of the mainstreaming of the black church aesthetic, if not black popular culture in and of itself. Surely, when the Edwin Hawkins singers logged a major crossover hit with “Oh Happy Day” in 1969, they could point to the aforementioned artists as well as Mahalia Jackson’s historic appearance at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival as laying the groundwork for their success. By the late 1960s, the black church was correctly understood as the foundation for the dramatic social movements that had coalesced around demands for civil rights and antiwar activism that aimed to transform the political and cultural landscape of the United States during the period. And from this perspective it was perfectly logical that Aretha Franklin—daughter of a prominent black minister—would emerge as one of the most popular artists of the decade. Less remarked about, though, is the role of Sly and the Family Stone in introducing the black church aesthetic to pop music audiences. When the group debuted in 1967 with A Whole New Thing the title could have been a reference to range of things, including the interracial and cross-gendered makeup of the band.